TERRAFORMING TERRA
We discuss and comment on the role agriculture will play in the containment of the CO2 problem and address protocols for terraforming the planet Earth.
A model farm template is imagined as the central methodology. A broad range of timely science news and other topics of interest are commented on.

Monday, June 23, 2014

N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces

Yes, it is coming. What a natural self
testing system. As recognition software improves, it identifies
faces on the internet a an ongoing project. Success is achieved once
all images are correctly identified. At the very least all forms of
impersonation fraud becomes impossible and you will not be able to
hide from your government at all.

I am not so sure that I am particularly
bothered by this development. There will be approved cut outs and we
will simply learn to operate inside appropriate bounds. We do
anyway. What is lost is freedom to abuse process. The reward though
is steadily improving personal security. That has been the objective
of civilization from day one.

What will become profoundly
inappropriate is the abuse of data to extort privilege. That is
likely to be carefully defended in the courts.

The National Security Agency is
harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that
it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in
sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret
documents.

The spy agency’s reliance on facial
recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four
years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood
of images included in emails, text messages, social media,
videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents
reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could
revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets
around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for
this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not
previously been disclosed.

The agency intercepts “millions of
images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition
quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped
potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former
agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While once focused on written
and oral communications, the N.S.A. now considers facial images,
fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission
of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the
documents show.

“It’s not just the traditional
communications we’re after: It’s taking a full-arsenal approach
that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their
regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric
information” that can help “implement precision targeting,”
noted a 2010 document.

One N.S.A. PowerPoint
presentation from 2011, for example, displays several
photographs of an unidentified man — sometimes bearded, other times
clean-shaven — in different settings, along with more than two
dozen data points about him. These include whether he was on the
Transportation Security Administration no-fly list, his passport and
visa status, known associates or suspected terrorist ties, and
comments made about him by informants to American intelligence
agencies.

It is not clear how many people around
the world, and how many Americans, might have been caught up in the
effort. Neither federal privacy laws nor the nation’s surveillance
laws provide specific protections for facial images. Given the
N.S.A.’s foreign intelligence mission, much of the imagery would
involve people overseas whose data was scooped up through cable
taps, Internet hubs and satellite transmissions.

Because the agency considers images a
form of communications content, the N.S.A. would be required to get
court approval for imagery of Americans collected through its
surveillance programs, just as it must to read their emails or
eavesdrop on their phone conversations, according to an N.S.A.
spokeswoman. Cross-border communications in which an American might
be emailing or texting an image to someone targeted by the agency
overseas could be excepted.

Civil-liberties advocates and other
critics are concerned that the power of the improving technology,
used by government and industry, could erode privacy. “Facial
recognition can be very invasive,” said Alessandro Acquisti, a
researcher on facial recognition technology at Carnegie Mellon
University. “There are still technical limitations on it, but the
computational power keeps growing, and the databases keep growing,
and the algorithms keep improving.”

State and local law enforcement
agencies are relying on a wide range of databases of facial imagery,
including driver’s licenses and Facebook, to identify suspects. The
F.B.I. is developing what it calls its “next generation
identification” project to combine its automated fingerprint
identification system with facial imagery and other biometric data.

The State Department has what several
outside experts say could be the largest facial imagery database in
the federal government, storing hundreds of millions of photographs
of American passport holders and foreign visa applicants. And the
Department of Homeland Security is funding pilot projects
at police departments around the country to match suspects against
faces in a crowd.

The N.S.A., though, is unique in its
ability to match images with huge troves of private communications.

“We would not be doing our job if
we didn’t seek ways to continuously improve the precision of
signals intelligence activities — aiming to counteract the efforts
of valid foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or
conceal plans to harm the United States and its allies,” said Vanee
M. Vines, the agency spokeswoman.

She added that the N.S.A. did not have
access to photographs in state databases of driver’s licenses or to
passport photos of Americans, while declining to say whether the
agency had access to the State Department database of photos of
foreign visa applicants. She also declined to say whether
the N.S.A. collected facial imagery of Americans from Facebook and
other social media through means other than communications
intercepts.

“The government and the private
sector are both investing billions of dollars into face recognition”
research and development, said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer and
expert on facial recognition and privacy at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation in San Francisco. “The government leads the way in
developing huge face recognition databases, while the private sector
leads in accurately identifying people under challenging conditions.”

Ms. Lynch said a handful of recent
court decisions could lead to new constitutional protections for the
privacy of sensitive face recognition data. But she added that the
law was still unclear and that Washington was operating largely in a
legal vacuum.

Laura Donohue, the director of the
Center on National Security and the Law at Georgetown Law
School, agreed. “There are very few limits on this,” she said.

Congress has largely ignored the issue.
“Unfortunately, our privacy laws provide no express protections for
facial recognition data,” said Senator Al Franken, Democrat of
Minnesota, in a letter in December to the head of the National
Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is now
studying possible standards for commercial, but not governmental,
use.

Facial recognition technology can still
be a clumsy tool. It has difficulty matching low-resolution images,
and photographs of people’s faces taken from the side or angles can
be impossible to match against mug shots or other head-on
photographs.

Dalila B. Megherbi, an expert on facial
recognition technology at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell,
explained that “when pictures come in different angles, different
resolutions, that all affects the facial recognition algorithms in
the software.”

That can lead to errors, the documents
show. A 2011 PowerPoint showed one example when Tundra Freeze, the
N.S.A.’s main in-house facial recognition program, was asked
to identify photos matching the image of a bearded young man with
dark hair. The document says the program returned 42 results, and
displays several that were obviously false hits, including one of a
middle-age man.

Similarly, another 2011 N.S.A. document
reported that a facial recognition system was queried with a
photograph of Osama bin Laden. Among the search results were photos
of four other bearded men with only slight resemblances to Bin Laden.

But the technology is powerful. One
2011 PowerPoint showed how the software matched a bald young man,
shown posing with another man in front of a water park, with another
photo where he has a full head of hair, wears different clothes and
is at a different location.

It is not clear how many images the
agency has acquired. The N.S.A. does not collect facial imagery
through its bulk metadata collection programs, including that
involving Americans’ domestic phone records, authorized under
Section 215 of the Patriot Act, according to Ms. Vines.

The N.S.A. has accelerated its use of
facial recognition technology under the Obama administration, the
documents show, intensifying its efforts after two intended attacks
on Americans that jarred the White House. The first was the case of
the so-called underwear bomber, in which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a
Nigerian, tried to trigger a bomb hidden in his underwear while
flying to Detroit on Christmas in 2009. Just a few months later, in
May 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American, attempted
a car bombing in Times Square.

The agency’s use of facial
recognition technology goes far beyond one program previously
reported by The Guardian, which disclosed that the N.S.A. and its
British counterpart, General Communications Headquarters, have
jointly intercepted webcam images, including sexually explicit
material, from Yahoo users.

The N.S.A. achieved a technical
breakthrough in 2010 when analysts first matched images collected
separately in two databases — one in a huge N.S.A. database
code-named Pinwale, and another in the government’s main terrorist
watch list database, known as Tide — according to N.S.A. documents.
That ability to cross-reference images has led to an explosion of
analytical uses inside the agency. The agency has created teams of
“identity intelligence” analysts who work to combine
the facial images with other records about individuals to develop
comprehensive portraits of intelligence targets.

The agency has developed sophisticated
ways to integrate facial recognition programs with a wide range of
other databases. It intercepts video teleconferences to obtain facial
imagery, gathers airline passenger data and collects photographs from
national identity card databases created by foreign countries, the
documents show. They also note that the N.S.A. was attempting to gain
access to such databases in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The documents suggest that the agency
has considered getting access to iris scans through its phone and
email surveillance programs. But asked whether the agency is now
doing so, officials declined to comment. The documents also
indicate that the N.S.A. collects iris scans of foreigners through
other means.

In addition, the agency was working
with the C.I.A. and the State Department on a program called Pisces,
collecting biometric data on border crossings from a wide range of
countries.

One of the N.S.A.’s broadest efforts
to obtain facial images is a program called Wellspring, which strips
out images from emails and other communications, and displays those
that might contain passport images. In addition to in-house programs,
the N.S.A. relies in part on commercially available facial
recognition technology, including from PittPatt, a small company
owned by Google, the documents show.

The N.S.A. can now compare spy
satellite photographs with intercepted personal photographs taken
outdoors to determine the location. One document shows what appear to
be vacation photographs of several men standing near a
small waterfront dock in 2011. It matches their surroundings to a spy
satellite image of the same dock taken about the same time, located
at what the document describes as a militant training facility in
Pakistan.

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About Me

18 years old, having cleaned out my HS library, I concluded the only ambition worth having was becoming a great genius. An inner voice cheered. Yet it is my path I have shared much to the Human Gesalt. Mar 2017 - 4.56 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO described as the SPACE TIME PENDULUM. Sep 2010 -My essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in Relativity. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data, record impressions, interpretations and to introduce new insights to readers.